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All this brings us to the final feature of winning teams: the fostering of a culture of sharing. My Wharton colleague Adam Grant categorizes people as “givers,” “matchers,” and “takers.”
lots more givers on the superteams.
Replicating this in an existing organization with real employees would be a challenge. Singling out people for “super” status may be divisive and transferring people into cross-functional teams can be disruptive. And there’s no guarantee of results.
As we have seen, the aggregation of different perspectives is a potent way to improve judgment, but the key word is different. Combining uniform perspectives only produces more of the same, while slight variation will produce slight improvement. It is the diversity of the perspectives that makes the magic work.
Superforecaster teams were like that, which is why extremizing didn’t help them much. But regular forecasting teams weren’t as good at sharing information. As a result, we got major gains when we extremized them. Indeed, extremizing gave regular forecaster teams a big enough boost to pass some superteams,
Ask people to list the qualities an effective leader must have,
Confidence will be on everyone’s list.
Decisiveness is another essential attribute.
And leaders must deliver a vision—the
These little anarchist cells may work as forums for the endless consideration and reconsideration superforecasters like to engage in but they’re hardly organizations that can pull together and get things done.
In fact, the superforecaster model can help make good leaders superb and the organizations they lead smart, adaptable, and effective.
Moltke an axiom whose implications needed to be teased out. The most urgent is to never entirely trust your plan. “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength,”
The fundamental message: think. If necessary, discuss your orders. Even criticize them. And if you absolutely must—and you better have a good reason—disobey them.
“Clarification of the enemy situation is an obvious necessity, but waiting for information in a tense situation is seldom the sign of strong leadership—more often of weakness,”
The Wehrmacht also drew a sharp line between deliberation and implementation: once a decision has been made, the mindset changes.
The wise officer knows the battlefield is shrouded in a “fog of uncertainty” but “at least one thing must be certain: one’s own decision. One must adhere to it and not allow oneself to be dissuaded by the enemy’s actions until this has become unavoidably necessary.”
Decision-making power must be pushed down the hierarchy so that those on the ground—the first to encounter surprises on the evolving battlefield—can respond quickly.
Auftragstaktik blended strategic coherence and decentralized decision making with a simple principle: commanders were to tell subordinates what their goal is but not how to achieve it.
The battlefield “requires soldiers who can think and act independently, who can make calculated, decisive, and daring use of every situation, and who understand that victory depends on each individual,” the command manual stated.
But what is often forgotten is that the Nazis did not create the Wehrmacht. They inherited
“Despite the evil nature of the regime that it served,” noted the historian James Corum, “it must be admitted that the Germany Army of World War II was, man for man, one of the most effective fighting forces ever seen.”14
“Have backbone; disagree and commit” is one of Jeff Bezos’s fourteen leadership principles
Intellectual humility compels the careful reflection necessary for good judgment; confidence in one’s abilities inspires determined action.
Talking to Kahneman can be a Socratic experience: energizing as long as you don’t hunker down into a defensive crouch.
Not even knowing it’s an illusion can switch off the illusion. The cognitive illusions that the tip-of-your-nose perspective sometimes generates are similarly impossible to stop. We can’t switch off the tip-of-our-nose perspective.
Viewed in this light, superforecasters are always just a System 2 slipup away from a blown forecast and a nasty tumble down the rankings.
Instead of answering the question asked—a difficult one that requires putting a money value on things we never monetize—people answered “How bad does this make me feel?” Whether the question is about 2,000 or 200,000 dying ducks, the answer is roughly the same: bad. Scope recedes into the background—and out of sight, out of mind.
But the superforecasters did much better: They put the probability of Assad’s fall at 15% over three months and 24% over six months. That’s not perfect scope sensitivity (a tricky thing to define), but it was good enough to surprise Kahneman.
But Taleb isn’t interested only in surprise. A black swan must be impactful. Indeed, Taleb insists that black swans, and black swans alone, determine the course of history. “History and societies do not crawl,” he wrote. “They make jumps.”
If you have to plan for a future beyond the forecasting horizon, plan for surprise. That means, as Danzig advises, planning for adaptability and resilience.
“Plans are useless,” Eisenhower said about preparing for battle, “but planning is indispensable.”
But a point often overlooked is that preparing for surprises—whether we are shooting for resilience or antifragility—is costly.
Knowing what we don’t know is better than thinking we know what we don’t.
Kahneman and other pioneers of modern psychology have revealed that our minds crave certainty and when they don’t find it, they impose it. In forecasting, hindsight bias is the cardinal sin.
Now comes the hardest-to-grasp part of Taleb’s view of the world. He posits that historical probabilities—all the possible ways the future could unfold—are distributed like wealth, not height. That means our world is vastly more volatile than most of us realize and we are at risk of grave miscalculations.
